By the time he reached the period of his Fourth Symphony, composer Anton Bruckner had staked a firm place in Austrian musical life. He had distinguished himself especially as an organist and was an almost peerless improviser on that instrument. In 1855 he had sought out the best harmony and counterpoint teacher he could find, Simon Sechter, to help him remedy what he perceived as his deficiencies in those areas, and after six years of what was largely a correspondence course (Sechter was in Vienna, Bruckner still in Linz), he moved on to similar study in orchestration and musical form from another esteemed pedagogue, Otto Kitzler.
Bruckner grew increasingly infatuated with the music of Wagner, and in 1865 he traveled to Munich to attend the premiere of Tristan und Isolde, the first of several Wagner premieres he would witness.
The following year, Bruckner finally moved to the musical capital of Vienna. There he succeeded his teacher Sechter as professor of harmony and counterpoint at the Vienna Conservatory, where he also took on organ pupils.
Here is conductor Herbert Blomstedt directing the Vienna Philharmonic in the first movement of this symphony:
